Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others.

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

[E]mpathy - not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance - is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun.

...how horrible and beautiful it is, that our eyes blur the truth when we can't bear to see it.

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing.

There's not a big gun culture in England at all still.

There's no better way to become a disintegrated character than to be your own authority.

We started tearing down the seniority system on Capitol Hill. All of that begins in the '70s. It accelerates and continues in the '90s, and it's going on to this day.

It is a simple chemical reaction that has nothing to do with fusion.

War is elective. It is not an inevitable state of affairs. War is not the weather.

There is but one way of refusing To-morrow, that is to die.

Of all the things I love to taste, sweetest is the kiss of love.